Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  A few weeks later, Carel van Loorens, metamorphosed into a prosperous merchant from the Persian Gulf answering to the respectable name of Haj Abdulaziz Abu Bakr, made his entry into Algiers at the head of a long procession of camels and an escort composed of twenty of the Imperial Guard’s best Mamelukes. He was carrying carpets, guns, pearls, sponges, cloth, and spices, merchandise of the highest quality for which he quickly found takers even though Algiers was at the time a wealthy city where you could find produce in profusion from all over the world, diverted from its original destinations by the pirate raids of the Barbary corsairs. But Loorens kept to himself three big iron chests, and to all who asked what was in them he invariably replied: “None is worthy to see the treasures that these chests hold if he be not Hokab el-Ouakt!”

  On the fourth day following his arrival, three of the Eagle’s men came for Loorens at the door of his inn. They signalled him to follow. He acquiesced, and they made him get into a sedan chair hermetically sealed by thick leather curtains. They took him outside the city to an isolated shrine where they locked him up after a thorough body-search. Several hours went by. At last, after nightfall, preceded by some of his bodyguards, Hokab appeared:

  “I’ve had your chests opened,” he said, “and they were empty.”

  “I have come to offer you four times as much gold as those chests could ever hold.”

  “What need do I have of your gold? The smallest Spanish galleon gives me seven times as much.”

  “When did you take your last galleon? The English sink them, and you daren’t attack the English. Next to their three-masters, your galliots are bathtubs!”

  “Who sent you?”

  “You are an Eagle, and only another Eagle may address you! I come to you with a message from Napoleon I, Emperor of the French!”

  Hokab el-Ouakt must have known who Napoleon was, and no doubt held him in high esteem, since without exactly answering in so many words the proposal he had received, he regarded Carel van Loorens from then on as an ambassador, and insisted on treating him with infinite consideration; he invited him to stay in his palace, an immense fortress overhanging the sea, with terraces of enchanted gardens resplendent with jujube and carob trees, oleanders and tame gazelles, and he gave sumptuous feasts in his honour where he made him sample rare dishes from America and Asia. In return for this, Loorens spent whole afternoons telling the Arab of his adventures and describing to him the fabulous cities where he had sojourned: Diomira the city of sixty silver domes, Isaura the town of a thousand wells, Smeraldine the city of water, and Moriane with its alabaster gates transparent in the sunlight, its coral columns supporting pediments encrusted with serpentine, its villas all of glass, like aquariums where the shadows of dancing girls with silvery scales swim beneath medusa-shaped chandeliers.

  Loorens had been the Eagle’s guest for almost a week when, one evening, alone in the garden onto which his suite of rooms opened, as he was finishing a cup of exquisite mocha and puffing occasionally on the amber mouthpiece of a hookah perfumed with rose water, he heard a velvety voice sing out in the night. It was an ethereal and melancholy woman’s voice, and the tune it sang sounded so familiar to Loorens that he lent his ear to the music and the words and was hardly surprised to recognise Chaucer’s Merciles Beaute:

  Sin I fro Love escapèd am so fat,

  I never thenk to ben in his prison lene;

  Sin I am free, I counte, him not a bene,

  He may answere, and saye this or that,

  I do no fors, I speke right as I mene.

  Sin I am free, I counte him not a bene,

  I never thenk to ben in his prison lene.

  Loorens rose and went towards the voice, and on the yonder side of a recess in the fortress, vertically above the jagged shoreline rocks, about ten metres higher than his own apartments, he saw, on a balcony entirely enclosed by gilded mesh and lit up in the dark by the mellow light of tarry torches, a woman of such extraordinary beauty that he threw caution to the winds, jumped astride the balustrade of his balcony, made his way along a narrow ledge to the other side of the fortress, and, using the indentations of the rock face, hauled himself up with his bare hands to the level of the young woman. He called to her softly. She heard him, made as if to run away, then, returning, came closer to him, and in a few breathless whispers told him her baleful tale.

  Her name was Ursula von Littau. Daughter of the Count of Littau, former aide-de-camp to Friedrich-Wilhelm II, she was to have been married at the age of fifteen to the son of the Spanish Ambassador to the Prussian court at Potsdam, Alvero Sanchez del Estero. The corvette taking her across the sea to her future husband in Malaga had been attacked by Barbary pirates. She owed it to her beauty alone that she had kept her life, and for ten years she had languished in the harem of the Eagle of the Instant, amongst his fifteen other wives.

  Half-hanging in empty space, Carel van Loorens listened to Ursula von Littau with tears in his eyes, and when she had finished her story he swore to free her the very next day. As a token of his oath he slipped his signet ring onto her finger, a ring with an ovoid bezel within which was set an opaline corundum intagliated with an 8 lying on its side. “For the Ancients,” he told her, “this stone was the symbol of memory, and there is a legend that whoever sees this ring once will never again be able to forget.”

  In less than twenty-four hours, abandoning entirely the mission the Emperor had entrusted him with, Loorens set up the escape of Ursula von Littau. Next day he obtained the necessary equipment, and in the evening returned to the foot of the harem balcony. Taking a heavy smoked-glass phial from one of his pockets, he poured a few drops of steaming liquid onto several parts of the wire mesh. Under the corrosive force of the acid the iron bars began to disintegrate, and Loorens was able to arrange the small opening which would allow the young Prussian woman to slip away.

  She came towards midnight. It was a black night. Far away, outside the Eagle’s suite of rooms, the guards paced nonchalantly up and down. Loorens unrolled a ladder of knotted silk which reached to the foot of the fortress, and which Ursula and then he used to descend ninety feet below to a sandy cove surrounded by rocks and reefs breaking the surface of the water.

  Two Mamelukes from his escort awaited them on this strand, carrying shaded lanterns. Leading them between the rocks and across stony landslips beneath the cliff, they guided them to the mouth of a dried-up wadi that went far up into the interior. The rest of the escort awaited them there. Ursula von Littau was hoisted into an atatich, that kind of round tent carried by camels and in which the fairer sex ordinarily ride, and the caravan set off.

  Loorens planned on getting to Oran, where Spanish influence still prevailed. But he didn’t have the opportunity to do so. Before daybreak, when they were still only a few hours’ ride from Algiers, the Eagle’s men caught up with them and attacked. The battle was brief and from the Mamelukes’ point of view a disaster. Loorens himself didn’t see much of it, as a shaven-headed Hercules knocked him out at the start with a mere blow of his fist.

  When Carel van Loorens awoke, aching all over, he found he was in a room that looked like a cell: flagstones, a bare, dark wall, with a built-in iron ring. Light came from a small round opening equipped with finely crafted wrought-iron bars. Loorens went up to it and saw that his prison was part of a tiny village of three or four shacks around a well, surrounded by a tiny palm grove. The Eagle’s men were camping out, honing their scimitars, tipping their arrows, and practising feats of horsemanship.

  Suddenly the door opened and three men appeared. They seized Loorens and took him to a place a few hundred yards from the village, beyond a few dunes, amidst dead palm trees which the desert had claimed back from the oasis; there they strung him to a wooden frame that was halfway between a camp bed and an operating table, with a long leather thong wound several times around his trunk and limbs. Then they went off at a gallop.

  Night began to fall. Loorens knew that if he didn’t die of cold in the night he would
as certainly be burnt to death by the sun next day as if he had been in the middle of his “solar forge”. He recalled describing this project to Hokab and the Arab nodding his head thoughtfully and mumbling that the desert sun needed no mirrors, and he reflected that in choosing to have him die by this means of torture the Eagle meant to teach him the meaning of his words.

  Years later, when he was sure Napoleon could no longer have him arrested and that Roustan could no longer have him killed, as he had sworn to, to avenge the twenty comrades slaughtered in this escapade, Carel van Loorens wrote a short memorandum of his adventure and sent it to the King of Prussia in the secret hope that His Majesty would grant him a pension in reward for having tried to rescue the daughter of his late father’s aide-de-camp. In it he told of how his life was saved by a mere stroke of chance, a chance that had the Eagle’s men tie him up with a thong of plaited leather. Had they but used esparto or hemp rope, or a canvas strip, he would never have been able to get free. But leather, as everyone knows, stretches when saturated with sweat, and after hours of contorted straining, heavy panting, sudden excruciations followed by shudders verging on the throes of death, Loorens felt that the thong, which up till then had dug deeper into his flesh with every effort made, had begun, minutely, to yield. He was so exhausted that despite the throttling anguish he felt, he dropped into a feverish sleep broken by nightmares in which he saw armies of rats attacking him from all sides and tearing out lumps of living flesh with their long teeth. He woke up panting, bathed in sweat, and felt that he was at last able to move his swollen feet.

  Within a few hours he had untied himself. The night was icy, and a violent wind whipped up swirls of sand which cut into his skin, badly bruised as it was. With the energy born of despair, Loorens dug a hole in the sand and hid himself as best he could, closing himself in with the heavy wooden frame to which he had been strapped.

  He couldn’t get back to sleep, and for a long time, struggling against the cold and the sand which got into his eyes and mouth and caked the open sores on his wrists and ankles, he tried to think out his position lucidly. It was not promising: to be sure, he could move his legs, and he would doubtless manage to survive this dreadful night, but he was critically weak, without food or water, and he didn’t know where he was, apart from being a few hundred yards from an oasis where those who had left him for dead were camping.

  If that was all so, then he had no chance of surviving. This certainty almost brought him some peace: it meant that his life no longer hung on his courage, intelligence, or strength, but on fate alone.

  The day broke at last. Loorens extricated himself from his hole, stood up, and managed a few paces. Over the dunes in front of him the tips of the palm trees could be seen clearly. There did not seem to be any noise coming from the oasis. Loorens felt his hopes rise again: if the Eagle’s men, their task done, had left their temporary lair and gone back to Algiers, that meant, first, that the coast was near, and, secondly, that he would find food and water at the oasis. This hope gave him the strength to haul himself as far as the palm trees.

  His reasoning had been wrong, or, at the very least, purely hypothetical, but it proved correct on one point: the oasis was deserted. The shacks, more than half collapsed, seemed to have been abandoned years ago, the well was dried up and swarming with scorpions, the palm trees were living their last seasons.

  Loorens rested for a few hours and dressed his wounds with palm fronds. Then he set off northwards. He walked for hours and hours, with mechanical and hallucinated step, across a landscape that was no longer a sandy desert but had become stony and grey, with sparse tufts of almost-yellow grass with sharp-edged blades and, now and again, a donkey’s carcass, all white and powdery, or a crumbling pile of stones that had perhaps once been a shepherd’s hut. Then, when the dusk was coming on once again, he thought he saw, far ahead, at the very end of a plateau bristling with crevices and lumpy protrusions, camels, goats, and tents.

  It was a Berber camp. The night was dark when he finally reached it and slumped in front of the fire around which the men of the tribe were seated.

  He stayed more than a week with them. They only knew a few words of Arabic and so could not communicate much, but they looked after him, repaired his clothes, and, when he left, gave him food, water, and a dagger whose handle was a polished stone girt with a strip of brass decorated with delicate arabesques. To protect his soles, unused to walking bare on stony ground, they made him a kind of wooden patten held onto his foot by a broad leather strap, and he took to it so well that afterwards he never went back to European shoes.

  A few weeks later, Carel van Loorens was safely in Oran. He didn’t know what had become of Ursula von Littau, and his attempts to organise a punitive expedition to free her were in vain. Only in 1816, after the Eagle of the Instant had been killed in the bombardment of Algiers on the twenty-seventh of August by an Anglo-Dutch flotilla, was it learnt from the women of his harem that the unfortunate Prussian girl had suffered the fate reserved for unfaithful wives: she had been sewn into a leather sack and thrown into the sea from the top of the fortress.

  Carel van Loorens lived for almost forty years more. Under the borrowed name of John Ross he became the Governor of Ceuta’s librarian and spent the rest of his days transcribing the Cordoban court poets and sticking on the flyleaves of the library’s books an ex-libris depicting an ammonite fossil beneath the proud motto: Non frustra vixi.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

  On the Stairs, 11

  THE RORSCHACHS’ DOUBLE door is wide open. Two trunks have been dragged onto the landing, two ship’s trunks, reinforced with studded leather, garnished with many labels. A third must be in the hallway, a room with a dark woodblock floor, panelled to head-height, with “rustic enlightenment” hatstands resembling deer’s antlers from a Ludwigshafen Bierstube and an art-nouveau chandelier, a hemispherical paste-glass bowl decorated with inlaid triangular motifs, giving a rather poor light.

  Olivia Rorschach entrains at midnight tonight at the Saint-Lazare railway station for her 56th world tour. Her nephew, who will accompany her for the first time, has come to fetch her with no less than four commissionaires. He is a lad of sixteen, very tall, with very black curly hair down to his shoulders, dressed with a sophistication beyond his years: a white shirt opening wide at the neck, a check waistcoat, a leather jacket, a tangerine cravat, and brown denims tucked into wide-topped Texan boots. He is seated on one of the trunks and sucks thoughtlessly at a straw inserted into a bottle of Coke as he reads The Frenchman’s Companion in New York, a small tourist-publicity fold-out published by a travel company.

  Born in 1930 in Sydney, at the age of eight Olivia Norvell became the most adulated child in Australia when she acted in an adaptation of Wee Willie Winkie at the Royal Theatre, in which she played the role taken by Shirley Temple in the film of the same name. Her success was such that not only was the play a sell-out for two years, but also, when Olivia let it be known through cleverly released rumours that she had begun to rehearse a new part, that of Alice in Alice’s Dream, a play vaguely based on Lewis Carroll and written especially for her by a professional playwright who had come over from Melbourne for that purpose, all the seats for the two hundred performances initially scheduled were bought out six months before the first night, and the theatre management opened a waiting list for possible subsequent performances.

  Whilst she let her daughter pursue her fabulous career, Olivia’s mother, Eleanor Norvell, an astute businesswoman, exploited the girl’s popularity for all it was worth, and Olivia soon became the most sought-after model in the whole country. And the whole of Australia was soon flooded with small newssheets and coy posters showing Olivia stroking a teddy bear or, beneath the professionally sentimental gaze of her parents, reading an encyclopaedia twice her size (Let Your Child Enter the Realm of Knowledge!) or, dressed as an urchin in peaked cap and trousers with braces, sitting on a kerb playing fives with three twins of Pim, Pam, and Poum in an Australian fore
runner of the Mind That Child! road-safety campaign.

  Though her mother and her agent worried endlessly about the disastrous effect that adolescence and, even more, puberty would not fail to have on this living doll, Olivia reached the age of sixteen without having ceased for a moment to be an object of such adoration that in some places on the west coast riots broke out when the crypto-commercial weekly which held exclusive rights to her photographs failed to arrive with the expected mail delivery. And it was then, in a moment of supreme success, that she married Jeremy Bishop.

  Like all pre-teen and teenage Australian girls of the period, Olivia had of course been a “war mother” to several serving soldiers between 1940 and 1945. In fact, for Olivia, it was a business of whole regiments, to which she sent her autographed photo; once a month, furthermore, she would write a brief letter to a private or NCO who had distinguished himself in some more or less heroic feat of arms.

  Private Jeremy Bishop had joined up as a volunteer in the 28th Marine Infantry (under the famous Colonel Arnhem Palmerston, nicknamed “Old Lightning” because of the thin white scar running across his face, as if he’d been struck by lightning) and became one of the fortunate few: for having helped his lieutenant out of the water at the bloody battle of the Coral Sea in 1942, he got the Victoria Cross as well as a handwritten letter from Olivia Norvell, ending with “love and kisses with all my tiny heart”, followed by a dozen little crosses each having the value of one kiss.

  Carrying this letter on him like a talisman, Bishop swore to himself that he would get another, and to this end redoubled his spectacular efforts: from Guadalcanal to Okinawa, by way of Tarawa, the Gilberts, the Marshalls, Guam, Baatan, the Marianas, and Iwo Jima, he fought to such effect and purpose that by the end of the war he was the most decorated lance corporal in all Oceania.